Sunday, March 13, 2011

Dungeon Maidens

So I recently got a Xbox game called Conan. It was 10 bucks at Wallmart. You play Conan, its pretty good, definitely not groundbreaking, in fact I can see many other better games influenced it. It is pretty fun though, it does feel pretty Conan-ish to me. Also Conan is voiced by Ron Perlman, which I really get a kick out of.

Anyway I played through it almost to the end and now my pretty girlfriend Sarah started playing the game. Sarah really enjoys it, she yells alot as she hacks apart the "Stygian Dog!"(as Ron puts it). She is actually alarmingly good at it, she is way better at pulling of the combos than me. She refuses to block-ever, and she fights with matching swords whenever she can (sometimes going to great lengths to find a matching set). One of her favorite things to do in the game is save the various scantily clad women which are scattered throughout the game.

As I watched her play today I got to thinking, why not put some scantily clad maidens in my dungeons? The more I thought about it the more interesting the idea became. Certainly there could be monentary and experience rewards for rescuing the maiden, as well as various 'story' awards. The maiden could well create roleplaying a resource managment problems for the party. Does the party calously leave her to her fate? Finish the ritual to gain dark powers? Turn back from greater exploration opportunities to escort her safely back to town? Or possibly even take her captive themselves. The maiden will certainly be a liability to the party once rescued. She will have no useful skills and has no ability to defend herself. Heres some B/X stats for a maiden, taken from the Isle of Dread and slightly modified.

Maiden

Found bound somewhere, usually a particularly terrible place. Although she has not been harmed yet it is only a matter of time before something truely horrible befalls her.